man or by woman, with calm gratitude, as a cream
on the good food of life, as the sunbeam and the
spring breeze, which make the day beautiful. I
seek not for them, but when they come, I enjoy
them as flowers given by the hand of the all-good
Father.

We are now near Vicksburg, a city of bad
reputation on the Mississippi, but a city also which
shows the ability of the North Americans for
self-government. A few years since a band of
desperate gamblers and adventurers settled
themselves down there. They set up a gambling-club
and decoyed young men thither, purposely excited
quarrels, fought with pistols in the streets and
even in houses, and committed every kind of outrage.
The wise men of the city assembled, and
announced to the gamblers that they must either
vacate the city within eight days, or that they
would be seized and hanged. The gamblers
treated the announcement with scorn, gambled and
quarreled, and had their pistol fights as before.
When the eight days of grace were past, the friends
of order in the city assembled, seized them, and
hanged the one who was the worst of the set, and
then, putting the rest in a boat, they turned them
adrift on the Mississippi. Such summary treatment
is called Lynch-law, and is the self-assumed
administration of law, by a sense of justice, where